November kicked my ass all month and then it kicked it some more. Now we’re in to December and the ass-kickings continue. I was denied disability benefits for the second time. Again, I haven’t seen any indication of why. I assume it would be the same reason I was denied last time, which was The Powers That Be not seeing any reason I couldn’t just go back to work.
This was going to be a much more cheerful post about a couple of times I had managed to talk myself out of having a panic attack but then I found out I was denied benefits and I’ve had all the stuffing knocked out of me again1. This is the beginning of my third year of sitting on my thumbs and I can’t seem to even get started without the carpet being pulled out from underneath me.
I am incredibly lucky that I continue to get support from my family but I shouldn’t have to be. I don’t know what The Powers That Be see that gives them such confidence in my ability to just go back to work but whatever it is, I definitely don’t see it. Or feel it. Its hard to not return to my personal favorite explanation, the “Lazy Piece of Shit Theorem” but I have been assured by many people that doesn’t hold up2. I still have a long list of appeals available to me, and the process continues but I don’t see much reason for optimism3.
Edited to add – A while ago, as part of the disability application process, I finally got all the dates of where and when I worked sorted out. It isn’t really relevant to anything right now but here it is:
February 2013 – Start at Swedish CVICU
July 2019 – Leave Swedish Cherry Hill for staff RN position at Swedish Issaquah
October 2020 – Leave Swedish Issaquah for staff RN position at Overlake
March 2021 – Leave Overlake for staff RN position at Virginia Mason
January 2022 – Leave Virginia Mason for RN Supervisor Swedish Issaquah
March 2022 – Leave Issaquah for UWMC
November 2022 – Last worked
So after spending close to seven years at one job I suddenly changed jobs 4 times in the space of two years. That has to mean something?
- Please don’t bother pointing out the significance of small victories like this. I’m aware that this is progress, of a sort, but being able to occasionally self-regulate my emotions (a skill most people learn as small children) pales in comparison to the disaster that is this country’s social safety net. I also realize I’m somehow supposed to remember that failures in one area don’t invalidate successes in another but, again, I have a hard time seeing how having a delicious dinner on the Hindenburg is supposed to make up for being horribly burned to death ten minutes later. Call me cynical. ↩︎
- Expert opinion is definitely against me on the Lazy Piece of Shit Theorem but all the evidence I’ve seen is, at best, Grade V (things you believe that I don’t) so I remain unconvinced. ↩︎
- I have a great deal of difficulty maintaining any sense of optimism about anything but, as a wise person once told me, that’s depression for you. ↩︎
Your lawyer correctly predicted this denial — “They seldom change their minds” — “folk” wisdom, which I believe they endorsed — “Apply three times, third time bring a lawyer.”
I can’t even imagine what it must be like to try to maintain an “attitude” of any type right now, Dude, let alone a positive one. About all I can say is that, given you are crawling through the sewers of the twin-GI-tracts of the Federal Government and the American Health Care System, sometimes the best you can do is keep taking fetid breaths as the opportunity arises. And as for your basic worth as a human being being (being being beingbeing) something that you have trouble internalizing, at least you can/have acknowledge/d that everyone else in your life disagrees with you on that point. It’s sumpin’.
Back in the day, everyone knew you got gastric ulcers from stress and acidic food. Then in 1983 these crazy Australians show up and they’re giving themselves ulcers by drinking solutions of H. pylori and then curing them with antibiotics.
I’m just saying, it isn’t unprecedented for the lone iconoclast to be right.
So your point is…what? That despite the fact that everyone around you thinks (and tells you) that you are a wonderful person who deserves happiness and comfort, you are in fact, against all evidence to the contrary, a piece of shit? And you’re using a Madame-Curie-level of historical scientific insight as the potential evidence to back your conviction?
Not to minimize the crippling effects of depression and trauma on one’s self esteem, but do you really think you’re such a paradigm-destroyingly awful example of the species that your horrible opinion of yourself bears more empirical weight than the opinions of those around you?
Here’s another sciencey-sounding turn of phrase for you to ponder: “peer review.” (◕‿◕)